The ship went out safely, came back
safely. The pilot was unaware of anything
wrong. Somewhere in the depths of his brain
was locked the secret that made him
MAN ALONE
BY DON BERRY
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Phoenix I belled out smoothly in the region of a G-type star. Therewas a bright flare as a few random hydrogen atoms were destroyed by theship's sudden appearance. One moment space had been empty except forthe few drifting atoms, and the next—the ship was there, squat andugly.
Inside, a bell chimed sweetly, signalling the return to a universe ofmass and gravitation and a limiting velocity called C. Colonel RichardHarkins glanced briefly out his forward port, and saw no more than hehad expected to see.
At this distance the G-type star was no brighter or yellower than manyanother he had seen. For a man it might have been hard to tell whichstar it was. But the ship knew.
Within one of the ungainly bulges that sprouted along the length ofPhoenix I, a score of instruments mindlessly swung to focus theirreceptors on the nearest body of star-mass.
Harkins leaned contentedly back in the padded control seat and watchedwhile the needles gradually found their final position on dials. A fewscattered lights bloomed on the console ahead of him. He grunted oncewith satisfaction as the thermoneedle steadied at 6,000° C. After thathe was silent.
He leaned forward and flipped up two switches, and a faint sound ofa woodpecker came into the control room as the spectrograph punchedits data on a tape. The end of the tape began to come out of a slot.Harkins tore it off when the spectrograph was finished with it,threaded it on the feeder spool of the ship's calculator, and insertedthe free end in the input slot.
The calculator blinked once at him, as if surprised, and spat out alittle card with the single word SOL neatly printed in the center.
Harkins whistled softly to himself, happily. I had a true wife but Ileft her, he whistled. Old song. Old when he first heard it. Had atrue....
He wondered vaguely what a "wife" was, but decided it probably didn'tmatter. Had a true wife but I left her, he whistled.
He was glad to be home.
The direction finder gave him a fix on Earth and he tried to isolatethe unimportant star from the others in the same general direction, buthe couldn't do it, visually. The ship would do it, though, he wasn'tworried about that. He wished he could use the Skipdrive to get alittle closer. It would take a long time to get in close on the atomicrockets. Several days, maybe.
Well, he had to do it. The Skipdrive wasn't dependable in mass-space.You couldn't tell what it was going to do when you got it too close toa large mass. He'd have to go in on the chemical.
Mass-space, he thought. Molasses-space, I call it.
Too slow, everything too slow, that was the trouble.
Reluctantly he switched off the Skipdrive's complacent purr. The suddenlack of noise in the cabin made him squint his eyes, and he thought hewas going to get a headache for some reason. Abruptly, all the cabinfurniture seemed very harsh and angular, distorted in some strange wayso as to be distinctly irritating to him. He brushed his foot acrossthe deck and the sound of his boot was rasping and annoying.
He didn't l